Classic Comic Compendium: THE LOW LOW WOODS was a highlight of Joe Hill’s Hill House Comics

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With the announcement of the first line-up from a reignited Vertigo imprint, DC has a dedicated home again for creator-owned crime, mystery, horror, and weird books. For a while there, they had a home under the DC Black Label imprint, kind of. It was more a home for DC-owned properties, but there were a number of holdouts. What was meant to be a simplification of age ratings and content line-ups became more of a muddling of identity.

DC Black Label was a place where you could see familiar DC heroes in adult situations, but not too adult because heaven forbid someone see a Batawang. And some out of continuity weird stuff. As well as one thing that was very good, yet sadly short-lived, the pop-up horror imprint of Joe Hill’s Hill House Comics. An imprint that captured the spirit of concise, in and out, limited series that Vertigo had also been known for amongst its perennial sellers.

“Something happened to us.”

One of my favourites of the imprint, one of the strongest in an entire line of extremely strong stories, was The Low Low Woods by Carmen Maria Machado, Dani, Tamra Bonvillain, and Steve Wands. A story of two high school girls coming to terms with their declining abandoned coal-mining town, skinless men, deer women, seemingly feral boys, sinkholes, a derelict sanitarium, and a creeping unease over a lack of memory. With an inkling suspicion that something absolutely horrible happened that they can’t remember.

The parallel to Centralia, Pennsylvania, and even Silent Hill, are there immediately, but this story gets weirder and deeper. Through the lens of the two protagonists, Octavia and Eldora, we see a town that has a horrible secret. One that has essentially failed all of its women and turned a blind eye to abuse. It’s a fairly densely layered tapestry of how years of horror could cause society overall to decay and corrupt. A very apt allegory to the silent, hidden, and accepted terrors that women have had to endure for centuries.

A large part of the story is told through what kind of amount to diary entries from the two protagonists. Machado gives each their own voice, introspection, and backstory – one really having deeper implications for the broader story, and it allows for Steve Wands to display a bit of differing fonts for each. It’s a nice visual distinction between the two voices.

And moody artwork from Dani and Tamra Bonvillain. Dani’s style calls back to DC’s horror and crime artists of old, like Richard Case and Eduardo Risso, with a heavy emphasis on solid black inks, fine scratchy lines, and a spare approach to character shapes. With some haunting designs for the monsters and weirdness going on in the story. Enhanced by a darker colour palette from Bonvillain, some sickly colours for washes, and the occasional weird glow.

“Forgetting is easy. We do it as automatically as breathing.”

The Low Low Woods by Machado, Dani, Bonvillain, and Wands is a deeply disturbing story that uses the conventions of horror to explore real terrors in a very clever, accessible fashion. It was a highlight in a sub-imprint that was full of diamonds, another example of what you can do with horror itself without ever stopping being a horror story. The magic and monsters integral to the story itself.